Filed under: Stop climate change | Tags: Climate Change, Climate Impacts, Sea Level Rise, Tuvalu e!
Shirley Atatagi, one our political advisors, is currently in Tuvalu for the King Tides Festival sends us another update from the Pacific. Read her previous blog post here
Today marks the first day of the Tuvalu King Tides festival. The festival slogan is a call to arms: “Tuvalu e! The tide is rising” King tides are a lunar phenomena that occurs once a year and leads to the highest tides in this part of the world. By ‘highest’ I mean higher-than-normal and that never used to be a big deal, except that ‘normal’ is evolving.
Filed under: Stop climate change | Tags: coal, Facebook, Greenpeace, Pacific Power
Facebook offices on University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA. Photo via Flickr
Facebook’s first ever data center, full of state of the art and energy efficient equipment, will be built in Prineville, Oregon in the north west of the US. Unfortunately the energy required to operate the data center will be supplied by the utility company Pacific Power, which is primarily fuelled by coal – the largest single source of global warming pollution in the world. We have called on Facebook to dump coal all together and instead use 100 percent renewable energy, taking the lead in being part of the solution to climate change.
Filed under: Greenpeace, Philippines | Tags: Green Electoral Initiative, Philippine Elections, Presidential Elections, Rancid
“Do you know where the power lies?”
This was a question that was posed by the seminal So Cal punk band Rancid in their 1995 album …And Out Come the Wolves, a question that I myself was forced to answer when I first played it on our tape deck as a teenager.
The line is from a song whose title nowadays rings a bell when heard as it is entitled The 11th Hour a now familiar line as it has also been the title of a Leonardo DiCaprio documentary that speaks of the urgency for climate action.
Again I am reminded that we are in an age of do or die decisions as far as the environment is concerned. Pollution has escalated beyond that of local incidence but to a scale that now transcends national and geopolitical boundaries; the nuclear industry lobby has now seized the opportunity to posture itself as the silver bullet solution to the energy requirements that hopes to eventually phase out fossil fuels in order to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide that leads to global warming; and even the food we eat is now threatened with the poisons and yet-to-be known side effects of industrial farming and genetic engineering.
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Filed under: Eliminate toxic chemicals, Life at work, Philippines | Tags: Activism, Cancer Warriors Foundation, Facebook, greenpeacebuzz, Step Juan, Tomas Leonor, volunteerism
When longtime Greenpeace volunteer Tomas Leonor told us about Step Juan, I thought it was a brilliant idea. Step Juan, which was co-organized with the Cancer Warriors Foundation, was meant to raise awareness and funds for children with cancer by walking the island of Luzon from North to South.
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace | Tags: Deep Green, Rex Weyler, Sustainability
Cultural habits – like people – go through stages when they face death. Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described this process as the ‘five stages of grief’ – denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before the final acceptance of reality. In human society, growth economics will eventually collapse in the face of ecological reality. We have witnessed decades of denial and anger about this end of growth, and society now appears to be entering the bargaining stage.
Filed under: Defending our Oceans, Greenpeace Core Values | Tags: human rights, japan, Junichi, tokyo 2, Toru, Whaling
An update from Sarah Burton, Deputy Program Director currently in Aomori, Japan on the first day of the trial.
It was Valentine’s night, and sure there was candle-light but it wasn’t a cozy tete-a-tete. Far from it. There was a bitingly cold wind as we stood vigil holding candles which read “ Justice” while we stood by an ice-sculpture in a square in the Japanese town of Aomori on the eve of the start of the trial of Junichi and Toru.
Filed under: Greenpeace, Greenpeace Core Values, Life at work, Philippines | Tags: Activism, Cancer Warriors Foundation, Facebook, greenpeacebuzz, Step Juan, Tomas Leonor, volunteerism
The 7x9 feet three panel mural painted by the University of the Philippines Artists’ Circle Fraternity to commemorate the 20th anniversary of SV Rainbow Warrior’s bombing.
To the dismay of my colleagues here in the Philippine office I am licensed to surf the web and even log on to this pesky website called Facebook –and come to think of it is indeed really interesting what you can find over there, as a few minutes ago I was able to come across Greenpeace International’s profile picture on their page and seeing it again (although technically I see it everyday as it is one of the first things that will always greet me as I enter the office) reminded me of the my first assignments when I started to become a part of Greenpeace, fulltime, not to mention one of the first people that I’ve been glad to call a comrade in the cause who is none other than —Tomas Leonor.
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Filed under: Philippines, Stop climate change | Tags: 2010 national elections, Eddie Villanueva, election, Jamby Madrigal, JC Delos Reyes, Joseph Estrada, Miriam College, Nicky Perlas, Pagbabago 2010 presidential forum, Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting, PPCRV, presidential candidates, Richard Gordon, TV5, Von Hernandez
Last February 7, a presidential forum was held in Miriam College, organized by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) and TV5. Six out of the 10 presidential candidates attended the event: Councilor JC De los Reyes, former President Joseph Estrada, Senators Richard Gordon and Jamby Madrigal, environmentalist Nicanor “Nicky” Perlas, and evangelist Eddie Villanueva. The forum was divided into three rounds. During the first round, the candidates got the chance to ask each other a question face to face, and were given two minutes to answer. A follow-up question was also asked each time, but with only a minute for answering. Continue reading
Filed under: Deep Green, Greenpeace, Volunteers | Tags: Amchitka, Canada, Greenpeace, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Rex Weyler
“L’imagination au pouvoir.”
(“Imagination is seizing power”)
Written on the walls of the Sorbonne, Paris, May, 1968
Greenpeace Southeast Asia 